Playing ambient/drone music with a name as Pasture, you can only have a pastoral touch and here it would be about the sunniest days of summer spent in the countryside.
It's the solo project of Joseph Yonker, also member of Willamette, a trio, whose first album on Infraction Records seems endlessly postponed.
"Composite", his debut album, is highly ecstatic, euphoriant and well I have to admit ... totally orgasmic.
It may sound a lot like the Stars of the Lid, Belong or William Basinski but only if they were converted to the true essence and splendid warm and ethereal shoegaze charms of My Bloody Valentine - I don't know why but their song "When you sleep" would situate perfectly the transmission - and Slowdive - best parts of Souvlaki and Pygmalion.
It reminds me also of the glorious days or Third Eye Foundation and Flying Saucer Attack, only if they were both more attracted by the light and less by darkness.
It is honestly a debut album of considerable beauty, stunning, breathtaking, amazing. The texture of the sound is both blurry and of a precise clarity. This can be only the work of someone totally obsessed until the tiny detail, though is not perfectionism, just an astonishing capacity of translation of a deep sensitivity, and without pathos it reaches unsuspected levels of emotional brilliance.
In an over-saturated style of music, Jospeh Yonker imposes himself and finds directly a personal expression, pregnant with his influences but never tempted by imitation.
I won't say this sounds totally new but each track is a wow, a surprise, an excitation. Ambient is supposed to be played quietly in the background, but I find myself rising the levels and listening to it fervently with full intensiveness under headphones.
Each track seems to contains so much of his life, and resonates so much for me, strangely not so differently to how Jenn "S" Ghetto's songs grips me, but here there is no despair, there is melancholy and humanity, almost like a benediction.
It is so strong that it can be disorientating, Joseph Yonker doesn't have the level of sound technique of Belong on "October Language" but imposes himself with similar effect and through a more soothing approach.
It's not a good album, it's an essential one.
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